Simple. Straightforward title. It’s the core of my situation this past week. I’m searching Flickr to try and find someone else’s picture to put here since I have nothing for this topic and haven’t posted much to my Flickr in a long time.

*Explore*.. *Creative Commons*.. *See More*.. Search for a tag of, say, “Back Pain”.. Ew. Ok maybe screw this idea. “Iceland”.. Sweet:

The top place I’d want to go to for a vacation would be Iceland. I’ll absolutely do it at some point. I hope. No, I will for sure.

Back to the main topic here. My back. (whine whine). I pulled my back out over a week ago from carrying my TV stand thing home from Ikea. And since it didn’t hurt right away, I went to the gym where among other things I ran over 3 miles. Now it hurts. I called my insurance company and, while it is covered, the deductible for a chiropractor is $300, plus some percentage of the total cost or something. I decided to try a massage therapist last night instead for less than that cost. Unfortunately it didn’t work. It felt good during, but there was zero improvement immediately after, and definitely zero improvement today. I slept like a baby though (meaning, the opposite of a baby).

I feel obligated to fill this post up some more. No to you, my dear valued reader, but to the img align=”left” tag. For some reason this sets pictures above any other page formatting there is and will let the picture bleed over into the next post. You can see for yourself by holding Control and scrolling your mouse wheel forwards to shrink the text on the page. Or just shrink the text size however you would normally do it. All the pictures that are left or right aligned bleed over their alloted “post block” while the block grows to accommodate the center aligned ones in the absence of text-space.

What a poorly written paragraph. But here I am now (in my browser at least) at the bottom of this beautiful Iceland image (by stuckincustoms on Flickr) and have no more obligations to continue my banter. I will say this last unrelated statement; the new season of Whitest Kids U Know is hilarious if you are into that kind of humour. Happy hump day!

I’m waiting for frozen minestrone soup to melt into a more edible format.

I really think that if I get an AV receiver and fix up the antique turntable my life will be complete. This fact only stands because this weekend I got a cocktail table, side table, table-thing for the kitchen and a set of surround sound speakers.

Holy Fuck is a stupid name for a good band. Check them out.

I think that the comments on my blog posts are proportional to the amount of text multiplied by the square of the quality of the picture included.

Guess the title.

It’s interesting to see who remembers what from something in the past. As in an old story worth reminiscing about. It’d have to be more than 5 years old for it to work. It’s interesting because people will commit different aspects of things to memory, different sections of the event, different emotions and whatnot. Sorry, no examples here, just an observation. Am I right?

I need an extra iPod charger, it just died after listening to it on shuffle for 2 days straight. Also, it was cloudy last night. At least the rain stopped.

rhys400D on Flickr

There’s a lunar eclipse tonight. It sucks that its raining here. Maybe it’ll clear up by tonight? Lastly, yesterday’s title was “My Life As A Circus Clown” by the Matthew Good Band.

I think I’ll toss in a picture for this one since the past two have been picture-less.

So, two things I want for this page. Number 1, a “recent comments” block-thing. Something to show where the recent comments are with a link to that post. And Number 2, a thing from last.fm that shows my top track of the week. Actually, come to think of it. Over the course of a week there would probably be a large multi-win tie between a bunch of tracks that I listened to maybe 3 times each. So that’s dumb. Scratch Number 2, I’m an idiot.

So that paragraph earned this post a tag of “Internets”, and this paragraph and the next few are for the “Music” tag.

I just discovered No-Man. A collaboration between my recording/production hero, Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree, Blackfield, among many others) and some other singer/songwriter guy, Tim Bowness, who has a pretty good voice. I’ve only heard their latest (from 2003), Together We’re Stranger in its 2007 reissue format. The 5.1 mix (by Steven Wilson) is fantastic and, I feel, addresses the concern about music genres translating to surround sound. The argument being that certain types of music are better suited for a surround setup, such as various experimental or electronic music with lots of little things that would “make sense” emanating from all around the room. An example would be Bjork vs John Mayer. While Bjork would “make sense” in surround sound, John Mayer would not because you wouldn’t want guitars or vocals sounding like they are coming from behind you. No-Man’s 5.1 mix is done very tastefully with the surround (rear) channels used sparingly, mainly for reverb and organ with the occasional clarinet line (yes it has clarinet).

What I’ve found is that the surround setup opens up the musical space. Duh, right? I had listened to the album in the car (decent speakers) a few times through. After listening in 5.1, more instruments were clearly audible. You are able to focus your attention around the room and pick out instruments that would otherwise have been “lost in the mix” (to the untrained ear of course). The only problem with 5.1 is that most people don’t have the ideal setup anywhere. Some will actually have all 5 speakers stacked in a line on top of their TV. If you ever get a chance, find a good space and listen to something you are familiar with in stereo as a surround sound mix. You could even go to Best Buy with your own DVD-A disc and pretend you are shopping for a new home theater setup. They’ll let you use your own material as reference.

Another good thing to do when shopping for surround sound material is to check who actually created the 5.1 mix. This information should be available anywhere and is definitely in the liner notes. The reason being it may be a cookie-cutter job. Some record label wanted to get some artists album into 5.1 and just paid whatever to have it mixed.

Mixing is an art. Mixing in 5.1 is too. Mastering is voodoo with a dash of magic. But that’s another story, ha.

Clearly I’ve lost readers. Nobody’s playing my guessing games anymore. That makes me sad. The last post’s title was “Map of Your Head” by Muse, from the Hullabaloo Soundtrack. Guess today’s title and win a blog post mention!

Its a long weekend coming up. Thank you Mr. President’s Day.  I’ll be going around the North and East Bay visiting relatives while my mom is visiting. Then, its a short work-week followed by another long weekend of super-crazy fun that I haven’t planned yet because its too far in advance.

Alright, short post. Now guess the title. Please? I have these Clarks shoes which are absolutely terrible in the rain. My big toe gets really wet, and that’s it. Even when its not raining, just the moisture on the ground is enough to get sucked up and soak my big toe (I wanted to write something that had at least some remote tie-in with the title of the post).

I had the pleasure this morning of flying by my old bus as it was stopped to pick up passengers. Good ol’ 22-Fillmore. It got me thinking. Maybe I just totally don’t notice it, but I don’t see many, if any, buses on my normal route to work in the morning.

The way I went on this particular morning was slightly out of the way so I could drop off about 30 lbs of dirty laundry at a very hard-to-find-in-San-Francisco wash and fold place. They’re all over New York. In fact, that’s pretty much the only way people get laundry done - someone else does it. Oh they have public places that could be used, but nobody wants to sit, wait and monitor their spinning laundry so that it doesn’t get stolen. I do have 2 washers and 2 dryers in my building, but I had too much to do (30 lbs is a lot, and the only reason I know the weight is because they weigh your bag and charge per pound).

Well, I was going to comment about people taking photographs of themselves and just decided not to. Instead this is now another guess-the-quote thing, its a song. Name it, Artist, Album. No cheating!

Oh, and Happy Valentines Day. More importantly, new episode of Lost!

Who’s excited for another episode of Lost tomorrow? I know I am.

This was on an episode of The Simpsons I watched last night. Made absolutely no sense. I laughed out loud:

Announcer 1: Uh oh, here comes our friend, Bullwinkle J. Moose. Uh oh, looks like ol’ Bullwinkle’s kinda gotten a taste of his own medicine. Ha ha.
Announcer 2: He certainly did, Bill.
Announcer 1: Ha ha. Wait, what did… Did what I say make sense?
Announcer 2: Well, no, not really Bill.
Announcer 1: Boy, now I know how the pilgrims felt.
Announcer 2: What are you talking about, Bill?

So, as expected, my order from BestPriceCameras was screwed up to no end. I’ve already repeated the story too many times and have no energy left to do it again here. Basically, I tried to fix things with them directly and nothing was resolved. Now its in the hands of my credit card company’s dispute department thing. Fingers crossed for good things!

Oh, two other things. 1) This is actually post #71. The one before, was post #70. I guess WordPress counts things you create and delete without posting, or something. 2) Evangeline Lilly is attractive. This is new. I didn’t think she was attractive before, like at all. I dunno, 3 seasons of Lost later and I guess she grew on me. Ha. Bye

This is post number 99. Can you believe it? I can’t!

Since I try to opt out of any email newsletters that might get sent my way, I have to find any music-related updates on my own. Boy, what a treat though:

- Porcupine Tree has a new live CD available for pre-order called “We Lost the Skyline”. It’s an acoustic performance featuring Steven Wilson and John Wesley from an in-store appearance at Park Avenue CDs in Orlando, Florida. Excited? I am. Placed your order? I did.
- 4 concerts are coming up in my area (one of which being the Matthew Good show, which isn’t new news). March 19th, The Black Crowes are at The Fillmore. Kaki King is at the Great American Music Hall on March 25th. And Dream Theater is in Oakland’s Paramount Theater, May 3rd.
- May 6th, down in Santa Barbara, is another concert as well. Ian will be teching, so that’ll be fun. I’m going to try and make it down there. (its an avril lavigne show)
- Another Porcupine Tree update: The 2008 edition of Porcupine Tree’s “Lightbulb Sun” album is expected in April as a CD/DVD-A double disc set. Similar to their remixed/remastered version of “Stupid Dream” back in mid-2006. The notice was posted January 16th along with the update for “We Lost the Skyline”s scheduled March release.
- Mute Math, with Matchbox 20, are in San Jose on March 12th (also in Vancouver, BC March 9th).

So much to look forward to! I’m still searching, so if I come across any more things I’ll update this post. Maybe.

I’m actually headed to Ikea in a moment, but I’ve already opened up Wordpress and begun. So now I have to finish, regardless of how half-assed this post will turn out to be (sorry, the same doesn’t work for Scrabble after 11:00 — that can wait).

This is an old antique turntable that was my Grandma’s before she passed. I’ve ended up with it because my mom got it and had it sitting in the basement getting no use whatsoever. At the moment, I’ve got an album on in the other room (check out the pic, another guessing game!), though it sounds terrible. All of the electronics are really really old and are barely functioning. I’ve got to save up a bit of money, but I totally plan on fixing this thing up. It needs a new everything. I’m thinking of installing a Stanton turntable and, obviously, replacing the amp that’s in currently. There’s still much research to do. The speakers need to be replaced as well (I didn’t take a pic of the inside yet).

Anyway, there’s my half-assed post with no ending. The record is skipping, so I’m done.